Event Recap: Red Hat Summit 2017

Posted on: May 17, 2017May 30, 2017

Christie Marsh

Thanks to everyone who joined us for a successful Red Hat Summit 2017 in Boston, MA. We know our team is very happy with the turnout, and hope that you can join us next year! Missed us at Summit? Here is a quick recap of our showcase:

Power Training

We kicked off the Summit week a day early with 9 power training courses. Each course lasted 2 days and gave students access to a 1 month trial of the Red Hat Learning Subscription. On Monday, attendees were invited to join us for a drink at the technical meet and greet and were surprised with a visit from Jim Whitehurst.

Red Hat Certified Professionals

We love to honor our Red Hat Certified Professionals each year at Summit. The ways we do this range from handing out ribbons to designate your certification on badges, to bringing the Red Hat Certified Professional store to the event, to announcing the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. This year, certified professionals had a large presence at the event, and we hope this community will continue to grow.

The Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year:

Orhan Bıyıklıoğlu, 2017 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year accepting his award on stage at Red Hat Summit from Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO

Red Hat believes in celebrating the power and contributions that IT professionals make to open source technologies. For IT professionals, attention on the job is often a sign that something has gone wrong. When things are going right no one thinks about system administrators. They think about them when the website is down, the mission-critical application is unavailable, or people are filing into the hallways because they cannot access their e-mail. The Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year award is an opportunity to celebrate these unsung heroes — not just the award winners themselves, but the worldwide community of RHCPs.

This year’s Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year from Turkcell was announced on stage in the opening keynote by Jim Whitehurst. Congratulations again, Orhan Bıyıklıoğlu on your success, and we are honored to recognize you this year. This video on his story was presented in the opening keynote.

The Annual Red Hat Certified Professional Reception

This year’s reception was hosted at Boston’s Harpoon Brewery and attendees received a Red Hat Certified Professional pint glass to take home with them. Cheers to Red Hat Certified Professionals!

Certification Baseballs

Sticking with the theme of the Red Hat Fenway Event on Wednesday night, we handed out Red Hat Certification baseballs signed by none other than Randy Russell, the Director of Red Hat Certification. Vice President, Red Hat Training + Certification, Ken Goetz (pictured) got in on the fun in the Partner Pavilion.

The Red Hat Training and Consulting Break Out Session

This year’s break-out session with Vice President, Red Hat Training + Certification, Ken Goetz, featured training and consulting customer, Rackspace, and their real world success story of how they rely on Red Hat certification to qualify their employees. This expanded on a mention in a recent case study on Rackspace.

Break fix challenge

3 Days. 3 Challenges. 3 Winners.

Each day summit attendees battled for a chance to win a coveted Nintendo NES classic. The challenge changed each day, and scores were broadcast on the leaderboard. What we learned is that these are the people you want to go to if your website goes down:

Self Paced Labs

Throughout Summit, we hosted an area with over 100 machines that provided 3 to 7 self-paced labs for 14 courses. Attendees were able to select which labs they were interested in and were then directed to a machine that would host their desired lab. This was a great way to get attendees hands-on with different Red Hat technologies they were interested in.

RED HAT CONSULTING

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs

If you attended Red Hat Summit this year in Boston, or tuned in online, it’s likely that you saw a mention of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. Open Innovation Labs kicked off Summit on Monday with a Facebook Live stream of the new Labs facility and Executive Briefing Center. For the remainder of the week, select Red Hat Summit attendees were able to tour the facility in hard hats and see the progress first hand.

With just over a year since its initial launch, Open Innovation Labs was featured at Summit in various breakout sessions, discovery zone sessions, and even Jim Whitehurst’s and Paul Cormier’s keynotes. Most notably, easiER AG, Swiss medical company and EMEA Labs customer, came on the main stage to demo the two applications created with Labs in just 4 weeks

While Summit attendees mingled around the Partner Pavilion of the BCEC, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs hosted a demo pod in front of the Consulting Discovery Zone. Red Hat experts from the Open Innovation Labs team were present to talk through ways participants could jump-start modern application development with Red Hat’s push-button infrastructure and transform their business culture with a Labs residency. Attendees were also able to build their own technology stack, where they could mix and match services, tools, and infrastructure services to meet their application development needs.

Breakout Sessions

Red Hat’s Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN) program hosted a breakout session demonstration on Using Ansible Tower by Red Hat to deploy Red Hat OpenShift. Speakers Patrick Rutledge, Principal Solutions Architect, and Shachar Borenstein, Manager of DevOps Cloud and Automation Team, both of Red Hat, presented on how the deployment of complex environments can be a growing pain within technology organizations today and how Ansible Tower by Red Hat and Red Hat CloudForms can be used to mitigate that pain. Learn about the tools and training shown during this session on redhat.com/open.

Discovery Sessions

This year in Boston, Red Hat Consulting hosted its Discovery Session Series for the second year in a row. Hosted by members of the Emerging Technology Practice, the Red Hat Consulting Discovery Zone was located in the Partner Pavilion in the BCEC as a part of the Red Hat Services Showcase. This year we saw an immense increase in audience size, due to the interactive nature of the sessions and the use-case-based content.

With standing room only in the Discovery Zone, Red Hat consultants and architects led discussions with the attendees, probing them to participate in the conversation and delve deep into their most challenging obstacles. For videos of the sessions, check out the playlist on YouTube.

A comprehensive list of the sessions can be found below:

Defining operational roles with containers and DevOps

A holistic approach to advanced cloud migration

A design approach to bridge DevOps and Business Automation

Enable agility with infrastructure-as-code

Best practices for successfully deploying NFV

Container-driven continuous delivery

Modernizing storage infrastructure with open scale-out storage

Accelerate application development with Event Storming and Open Innovation Labs

Building mobile workforce-management solutions

Self-healing networks using Ansible

Converting a Tibco BusinessWorks application to Apache Camel

To learn how open source technology can generate value and transform your IT, book your own discovery session by contacting discoverysession@redhat.com.